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Daily Tech Digest - April 08, 2017

CIOs first need to understand the DMARC standards that have been published and understand that there are companies that can help prevent the fraudulent use of your email domains, thus protecting your brand. For example, there are a number of customers whose email domains were hijacked to elicit personal information or extort money. There have also been instances where an email, appearing to come from the same company, is sent to a corporate executive with instructions that are intended to harm the company -- such as transferring large amounts of money. In my role as CIO at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, criminal organizations would use the CBP email domain to send out demand notices for payment of duty and fine. Spear phishing is another core problem for corporations. Cybercriminals use targeted spear phishing of corporations' emails as one of their most common attack vectors.

At Bridgestone, analytics allows the company to innovate new processes in key areas, such as site selection and staffing. A new staffing program, using predictive analytics, determines the appropriate allocation of 22,000 workers across 2,200 stores — putting enough workers in stores for peak demand while avoiding unneeded labor costs when business is slower. “The headcount model we built is based on standard industry practice, but it’s groundbreaking here at Bridgestone,” says Moody. The payoff will be millions of dollars per year in efficiency gains and increased sales, he says. The key advantage for Bridgestone is applying those industry standard practices in ways that capitalize on Bridgestone’s unique capabilities.

Are the machines going to be able to make all the decisions and we will have no role to play? You can say the same thing about all aspects of life, so why only procurement? I think human intelligence is still here to stay. I believe, personally, it can be augmented. Let's take a concrete example to see what it means. At SAP Ariba, we are working on a product called product sourcing. Essentially this product takes a bill of material (BOM), and it tells you the impact. So what is so cool about it? One of our customers has a BOM, which is an eight-level deep tree with 10 million nodes in it. In this 10 million-node commodity tree, or BOM, a person is responsible for managing all the items. But how does he or she know what is the impact of a delay on the entire tree? How do you visualize that?

High on the list, at No. 3, was MySQL, the database technology first developed in 1995. MySQL currently helps run huge, Web-scale companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. But it’s also worth noting that several “NoSQL” database technologies — which are non-relational databases, unlike MySQL, and are often better suited for parsing the unstructured data being thrown off by many companies today — also ranked highly. These NoSQL technologies include MongoDB, which came in at No. 9 in our index; Redis, which is being commercialized by company Redis Labs, at No. 12; Cassandra, which came in at No. 25 and is behind the database company DataStax; and Elasticsearch at No. 7, which is being commercialized by Elastic. MongoDB raised a new round of financing in late 2015 — the company is estimated to be valued at around $1.5 billion

Several industries and domains are now experimenting with Internet of Things automation (IoT) to step into a new age where everything can be controlled centrally. Smart homes, smart cities, smart parking systems to smart shopping malls, everything is covered under this technology. Some of these Internet of Things automation systems are already implemented in some countries, while others are still in planning phase. Once everything is set up through internet of things automation, anything can be controlled centrally! It has the potential to spoil users for convenience, flexibility and comfort. Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate. Businesses have to adapt to these technological updates and trends to match their customer’s expectations and survive in the highly competitive IT market. Let’s join hands with Internet of Things to redefine our lifestyles.

One concrete example of graph databases being used in logistics is eBay, who (owing to the acquisition of Shutl) provides a service that uses graphs to compute fast, localized door-to-door delivery of goods between buyers and sellers, scaling their business to include the supply chain. Incidentally, eBay observed that before turning to graphs the latency of their longest query was higher than their shortest physical delivery, both around 15 minutes — something that can’t now be replicated when an average query is powered by a graph database and takes 1/50th of a second! The eBay example is not isolated. Organizations large and small are adopting and winning with graphs in retail, finance, telecoms, IT, gaming, real estate, healthcare, science, and dozens of more areas.

Firewalls and cutting-edge technology designed to keep networks safe and secure can be undone simply by asking employees to click a link. An email requesting employee W-2s that looks like it's coming from the CEO can turn a well-meaning worker into the unwitting source of a data leak. That's why Kris Evans travels the country to speak about cybersecurity and why it's everyone's business, whether it's a janitor or a CEO. He gave a keynote last month at a cybersecurity conference on the North Dakota State University campus. "We're seeing that hackers' best friends are friendly employees," said Evans, a certified identity theft risk management consultant and national marketing director for Harvard Risk Management Corp. NDSU makes cybersecurity everyone's business, not just tech professionals like Marc Wallman.

Business analytics not only tops the list of IT investments, but it also ranks first on the list of departments that executives think deserve even more investment. It has also, according to Torres, ranked as one of the highest investments for a longer period of time than any other item. “This topic area has been number one on this investor list for the last eight years, and it’s been in the top three for well over a decade now,” he said. “Even other technologies that had huge interests for long periods of time — ERP comes to mind — didn’t see this level of stability at that top spot.” Torres explained that the competition to hire the best talent is what’s driving much of the spending on business analytics. “If you look at business analytics programs, particularly at the graduate level, these are springing up all over the place at colleges and universities,” he said.

Disruptive technologies also have their place in more day-to-day, but no less important, uses. In a session on managing multicloud environments -- combinations, for example, of software applications, infrastructure services and private cloud implementations -- speaker Judith Hurwitz said cognitive computing can be used to collect data about IT systems and then understand what optimal performance levels IT systems should be at. "It doesn't happen on day one," said Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates and author of many books on IT. "But over time you'll start to collect this data and say, 'Gee, I know the normal condition for these three systems exchanging information and working together should act like this. And one day it acts differently. It goes ping-ping-ping. Well, that's not normal.'"

"Concurrency, I think, was the biggest one," Klahr says. "But the user experience with BigQuery was also really nice. Maybe this isn't a surprise because Google has focused so much on consumer products over the years: Everything about using the product was really nice. The thing that actually took the longest was loading the data from our local network onto the cloud. Once we had the data there, the creation of the tables was really easy." For its benchmark, AtScale used the same model it deployed last year for its benchmark tests of SQL-on-Hadoop engines on BI workloads. For that test, the idea was to help technology evaluators select the best SQL-on-Hadoop technology for their BI use cases. The goal was the same for the Google BigQuery benchmark.